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E3 Doom III Preview

Warped-Reality writes "GameSpy has a new Doom III Preview covering aspects of the storyline and how Doom III will be different from the rest of the FPS genre. It includes some pictures of the E3 Doom III demo booth. As the article says, "This is DOOM III, and it's going to scare you to hell."" Looking at these images, I can only say two things: Wow and Cool Toilets. Update: 05/22 19:55 GMT by M : There's also an interview with Carmack giving a few more details about the game.

18 of 401 comments (clear)

  1. Co-Op by ecliptik · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I know it's geared towards single player, but is there going to be any co-oping ability to go through the game?

    This is one feature I really liked about the Doom and Doom II and I've been missing in current FPS titles.

  2. Re:DOOM & QUAKE by neo8750 · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Why does 1 company need to have two almost identical first person shooter games?

    I would have to say it would be due to the fact that the last game they released being Quake III has been out for quiet some time now.

  3. originality by Spy+Hunter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Man, couldn't they have thought up something a little more original? I mean, mysterious otherworldly monsters coming through portals into a large installation is pure Half-Life! The whole "aliens take over people's bodies and mutate them into gruesome monsters" thing is totally unoriginal as well. No shock value at all left in that anymore. Are there going to be cowering white-lab-coated scientists too? How about small crawling creatures that jump up and try to eat you when you get close?

    --
    main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
    1. Re:originality by teamhasnoi · · Score: 3, Insightful
      Hey, those head crabs in Half-Life gave me a freakin' heart attack.

      Seriously, Evil needs to hire some creative consultants. I think I've witnessed every gruesome death, and most every toothy monster. Movies and TV too often blow their wad right off. Time to watch Aliens, or some choice X-Files (Home). Suspense and keeping it going...some movie (called/about a) Blackout did a great job with this. Kept you going, piling stuff on till you're going crazy trying to figure out what the hell is going on. I don't think anyone died in it, IIRC.

      You know what was scary? The part in Monsters, Inc. where the closet in the kid's bedroom is just a little open. That was just fucked up unsettling.

  4. Not Popular by pyrrho · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ok, I hate this! I'm sick of blood fantasy. Who cares if it causes real tragedies or not... I'm just bored of it and see photo-realistic blood smears as, well, not that great a use of my fantasy time. Yeah, you can do whatever you want, yada yada yada, I'm not telling you not to play this game, I don't care. It's an opinion, mine, about it's pointlessness.

    That people see that stuff and can only think how "nice" it looks... um, something way pent up in there boys! But you should Really Enjoy the war they are about to send you to! "Wow, look how realistic my dead buddy looks! It almost looks real... what? it is real?!"

    --

    -pyrrho

    1. Re:Not Popular by ryepup · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I guess for a lot of us, the blood and gore provides release from a ever more politically correct society. It is a harmless way of rebelling against meaningless politeness and conservative extremists. Also, half of life is the dark, the unhappy, the evil. By making music or a game out of some of those, it gives us some release. People listen to Smashing Pumpkins romantic ballads about sadness and misery because they make it sound so beautiful, and that somehow lessens the listener's pain. Granted there's a big difference between music and shooting zombies, but I think the concept is the same.

      On second thought, its more like a haunted house. There's blood and gore everywhere in those things, yet people keep going in again and again. We do that for the adrenalin (sp?), for the thrill. Same with roller coasters. They are all means of evoking rarely felt emotions.

      I don't know if that made any sense, so I'm going to bed.

  5. Silence of the Bills by donnacha · · Score: 3, Insightful


    From the Carmack interview:

    Doom III is pushing the fear factor over the raw action.

    My main fear is how raw my wallet will feel after I pay for a graphics card that can handle this "complete unification of lighting, shadowing, and bump mapping across all visual elements".

  6. Fear over action - not the Doom I remember by galaga79 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    According to this quote from John Carmack it looks like we are going to be getting a Doom game quite different its successors. Hell it looks more like Resident Evil or Half Life than the original Doom games.

    John Carmack: Doom III is pushing the fear factor over the raw action. As you make the worlds more and more believable, you are forced to tone down the "superhero" aspects of the game. I still think that a good game can be built around "toon time" action, but that isn't what Doom III is going to be about. The monsters are going to be much more independently fearsome, rather than just acting as moving gun turrets.

    I don't know about the rest of you but for me Doom was the action orientated gameplay, where for example often you had to take on over a dozen imps with a mere shotgun. It would be great to relive that experience all over again in a 3D fully environment powered by a cutting engine.

    However perhaps this shift isn't all bad because part of the reason Doom was all action orientated in that it lacked a substantial story. Yet for the first time it looks Doom will have a proper story with science fiction writer Matthew Costello doing the story and dialog. Also the shift way from action can be attributed to the fact that 3D models aren't as efficent as Doom's 2D sprites when you want to put lots of enemies on screen.

    Despite the gameplay differences hopefully there will be some camoes of the original Doom enemies or weapons in the game.

  7. Serious Sam by Drakker · · Score: 2, Insightful

    If you want action packed gameplay with tons and tons of monsters, I suggest you check Serious Sam from croteam (www.croteam.com). It plays almost exactly like doom, with a recent graphical engine (serious engine ;)... it even has Coop play!

    About the shift to an horror style game, I trust Id software on this. I know they will make a great game, and it should be released for linux at the same time as the Mac/Windows versions. =)

  8. Sounds good to me! by ceswiedler · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I imagine that I'm not the only one tired of Q3-style shoot-em-ups. It's great to see a return to atmosphere and cinematic feeling in a game. I hope, though, that the game doesn't rely on cut scenes, which for me are absolutely worthless. I haven't watched a single moment of the cinematics CD with Diablo 2, and I can't stand games like Final Fantasy which aren't much more than crappy RPGs built around good CG cut scenes.

    The most fun single player game I ever played was the Alien mod for Doom. I remember inching my way through the tunnels, and then jumping in my seat when an alien burst out of the wall at me. The designer of that mod had an excellent sense of mood and atmosphere. The entire first level didn't have a single monster on it. But the second...

  9. Backtracking? by red5 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This has been one of the areas where I know we are going to get some negative feedback. Doom III will only have minimal multiplayer facilities when released, because we are concentrating all of our efforts on making it an outstanding single-player experience.

    Remmber when ID announced that Quake 3 would be only multiplayer.
    Sinlgle player is dead etc.

    The only problem with that was the over sateration that happened just after. Single player is back. I can't wait.
    The problem with multi player is that most of us are tired of compeeting all the time.
    It's also worth noting that the biggest selling (IIRC) game on the PS2 (GTA3) has no multiplayer mode.

    --
    I know I'm going to hell, I'm just trying to get good seats.
  10. Re:Lots of monsters... by MrBId · · Score: 1, Insightful

    What about Serious Sam 1 or 2

    Some areas you would run out of ammo

    and they would still be coming at ya.

    Brought me back.....

  11. Re:But... but... by Glytch · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Oh, cry me a fucking river. There's a lot of us who want an enjoyable single-player game for once, and not have to have our skill determined by our ISP's ping time. You've got Counterstrike, Q3, UT, ad nauseum. Let the rest of us enjoy a new game, and not a rehashing of the Q2 engine, for once.

  12. Co-Op vs Scripts by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Co-op and the kind of heavy scripting you see in single-player games these days don't really coexist well most of the time. If you have some complicated scripted event that's supposed to trigger under certain circumstances and that impacts gameplay way down the line, you can't very well have two or three or four independant players running around in different parts of a map.

    When the game consists of "get key, push button, open door" style of primitive entity interaction, co-op is a no-brainer, but for anything more complex you run into some serious logistical problems.

    Doom is confirmed to have some kind of scripting engine; id also has Jim Dosé, Ritual's Script-Fu King, on the payroll. So I think we can assume that co-op isn't likely, though I'd really like to be wrong.



  13. Re:Okay, if I had a chance to interview Carmack by grammar+fascist · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'll answer this one for him, though he'll probably log on, slap me one, and answer it himself:

    Would you consider writing the client and server game logic modules in a multiplayer oriented game in a different language from each other?

    One of the ways to make an online game consistent despite latency is client-side prediction. For simplicity in prediction, a lot of the code is shared between the client and server games. (Check out the BG_ functions in the bg_*.c/h files in the Quake III game source for an example.) Having those written in separate languages would preclude code sharing, creating a big maintenance headache.

    Besides, why would you ever want to do that? I can't think of one good reason for it.

    --
    I got my Linux laptop at System76.
  14. Re:Sounds like Half Life's plot by MayonakaHa · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Not to nitpick, but the plot of this Half Life thingy sounds a lot like those old Doom 1 & 2 games..

    Isolated research facility.. teleporting experiments.. people turn into zombies.. the whole nine yards

  15. Re:Nice, but... by stevarooski · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Mod the parent up! He's right--just adding more polygons is really a no-brainer brute force solution. Its the increasing number of effects supported in hardware that is REALLY coming into play with new games coming out today.

    There are lots of neat things one can do that look great and cost less to render than extra geometry. I obviously don't know the details of the engine, but as a lowly undergrad interested in graphics I know that just adding bump mapping alone can make tremendous difference in how 'real' a scene looks--and all it does is mess with how surface normals are used in shading. Very low cost! And thats just one effect alone--add surface geometry manipulations based on height maps and you get low-cost facial features. Gauraud (and hopefully soon, Phong) interpretation gets rid of polygon edges in hardware quickly. Finally, add lightmaps and (limited) dynamic shadows and all of a sudden you have an engine that can really express atmosphere.

    Yeah, being able to render more polys is great, but when you finally get to boot up Doom 3 you'll really get to see some of the payoff you were promised when you bought that geForce 3. :o)

    --

    - - - - - - - -
    Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
  16. You're not the only one. . . by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Warning: The following IS contentious, unlike the original poster who got slammed for sharing his thoughts anyway. . .

    --If you'll notice, a couple of the posters replying to your comment were very brief & very rude. I don't think this is coincidence. I believe that one can equate point and shoot, 'blood fantasy,' as you aptly describe it, with a self-willed decline in brain power, awareness and life energy in general.

    Obsessing over death, fear and sadness in games, music, literature and film lowers people and makes them less. It sucks away something vital. Watch for it. It's there to be seen by those who are not scared to notice the patterns.

    I don't advocate censorship of any kind. Everybody must be free to explore art and life to the fullest extent. Only in this way do people learn.

    I will, however, offer the following. . .

    My advice to people who seek symapthy in dark arts is to, rather than seeking temporary solice from angry music and simulated blood sport, endeavor instead to change yourself, your life, your job, etc., so that you are no longer trapped in systems designed to keep you in misery and frustration. All one needs to achieve this is to learn. Achieve a calm state of being, and you will find that sympathetic vibration, (for lack of a better term), will no longer be found in loathsome art, but instead in lighter thoughts. Life power, awareness and happiness will similarly increase as you focus away from sad things.


    -Fantastic Lad